On RSA Hack …

Recently our IT system admin surveyed the company about some changes on how we would use the RSA SecureID. As I was totally oblivious about the RSA hacking incident, I did not pay much attention to the survey. Then earlier this month when I was doing a product demo at a client site, I found that my company VPN login stopped working half way during the demo, and it remained so for the next couple of days until I rang up IT support and got it reset. Obviously, as a precautionary action, the sys admin had changed the RSA RADIUS policy …

Although the RSA hacking incident and the related APT attacks did not affect my company, it is enough to get the IT department worried. In the Open Letter to RSA Customers, RSA called the attack ‘extremely sophisticated’. However, knowing that it comes from the Chairman of RSA, you have to take it with a grain of salt. In the blog Anatomy of an Attack by Uri Rivner from RSA, we gain some insight into what had happened at a very high level. I find nothing new in the method of the attack though. However, there are a couple of points that bring a smirk or two.

First is the use of reverse-connect mode of the backdoor software to circumvent the firewall at the remote end. This reminds me of the bad/good old days before the proliferation of the internet. My job was to develop IVRs for customers across many industries. To maintain the system, we would need to connect to them remotely. In those days, the connection method of choice was via good old PSTN line modems, which are plugged into the IVR system. The ‘normal’ mode of connection would be to dial up to the modem and login (using the UNIX cu command). However, to save on long-distance call cost, we usually buried hidden option in the IVR menu. Upon entering a code, the IVR would invoke some shell script to get the remote modem to dial back to the office modem and give a login prompt upon connection – using the UNIX ct command. This use of reverse connection is totally legit, by the way.

The second and more obvious point is the use of social engineering as the starting point. We have seen from spy movies time and time again that human is the weakest link in the line of defence. This social engineering is made extremely easy and cheap today, thanks to the massive adoption of social network services. This is part of the reason I doubt the words of ‘extremely sophisticated’ coming from RSA Chairman. It is extremely easy to find out someone’s personal details from their social network web pages, and find a list of friends that they trust. This makes it extremely easy to spoof an email with backdoor attached and have a high probability of it getting viewed and opened. Once the backdoor is in, all bets are off. You don’t have to be ‘extremely sophisticated’ to snoop around and gain more data – e.g. most people use their mailbox as a file repository, when someone has access to the Outlook PST file, then they can see a history of everything. This is partly the reason I never use thick mail clients and use the webmail instead – after all, it is the era of the cloud man!

Another interesting statistics is by looking at Who Else Was Hit by the RSA Attackers. Apparently, similar attacks have happened to hundreds of other companies recently and close to 90% of the attacks came from Beijing. No wonder people conclude that the attacks were state sponsored! China is a country where censorship is absolutely in every medium. The mass majority of the netizens are subjected to the GFW of China, which dynamically blocks destinations based on myriad of rules, including a government issued list of sensitive keywords. So in a country where vast number of web addresses are inaccessible to the normal citizens (including many social websites, and even this blogger site), only the privileged and well resourced can carry out such ‘extremely sophisticated’ attacks.